27-Sep-19: Weaponized Palestinian Arab children and more Arab-on-Israel stabbings

Image Source

From Israel National News, an on-duty Israel Police officer was stabbed in Jerusalem's Old City Thursday afternoon.

The attack on the woman is being treated as a terror attack. Her injuries were relatively mild (for a stabbing); she was brought to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment.

The knifer was apprehended after being wrestled to the ground (not shot, not beaten to a pulp) and taken into custody by other officers at the scene. Israel's Channel 13 News shows a video clip [here] and says the attacker is a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen.

Thirteen. Yet another weaponized child. A life incomprehensibly cheapened, and in danger of being wasted before it gets underway.

Referring to this child assailant, Times of Israel says he approached a cluster of officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate (in Hebrew: Sha'ar Hashalshelet), above the Western Wall area, around 4:00 pm. He pulled out a knife and in the customary way attempted to stab anyone he could, indiscriminately. Any Jew would do.

We expect he will now become another poster child for the irresponsible human rights industry's pleas for Israel to stop arresting children. Listening, Amnesty?

A day earlier, Wednesday, an Israeli woman of about twenty was stabbed in another act of Arab-on-Israel terrorism near the busy Maccabim/Shilat Junction on Route 443. That's the major highway that runs between Jerusalem and the airport.

The website of i24News reports that the woman was standing at a bus stop which is adjacent to the main entrance to the city of Modi’in. For what it's worth, the bus stop is inside the Green Line which is frequently - and totally misleadingly - called the 1967 border. (It's simply the 1949 armistice line, nothing more.) The Arabb news reports we have seen tell their readers that this was an attack on settlers in some occupied place. It's a powerful form of incitement, too good to skip by troubling themselves with checking the actual facts.

The Israeli victim received emergency medical treatment at the scene and was brought to Tel Hashomer Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Her condition was described as light to moderate in a Magen David Adom bulletin.

We found this security camera footage on an Arab news site (the contents almost certainly originated with an Israeli source):



A 14-year-old Palestinian Arab male was taken into custody at the scene. Yes, 14. Yet another weaponized child. Who says the Palestinian Arab education system produces nothing notable?

Child weaponization by the Palestinian Arab despots of their people's children is a subject that enrages us. That's one reason why we address it so frequently. Click here for some our prior posts on this deplorable and ongoing phenomenon.

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Zamienione w broń palestyńskie dzieci") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

UPDATE Thursday October 10, 2019: The stabber in the video above, the attack near Modi'in, turns out to be all of fifteen. Times of Israel reports today

15-year-old Palestinian indicted for stabbing Israeli woman near Modiin
Teen charged with terror offenses for attack at Maccabim Junction on Route 443 last month
October 10, 2019 at 2:18 pm | Prosecutors on Thursday indicted a 15-year-old on terror charges for stabbing an Israeli woman near the central city of Modiin last month. According to the indictment, the teenage boy is accused of carrying out a terror attack, illegal possession of a knife and entering Israel illegally. The prosecution has requested that the suspect be detained until the end of legal proceedings. The 22-year-old woman was stabbed on September 25 at the Maccabim Junction along Route 443. She was treated in a hospital for a stab wound to her upper body. Police said a Border Police officer was also lightly hurt while restraining the suspect. According to police, Border Police officers driving on Route 443 spotted the suspect trying to flee and chased after him on foot. The officers fired a number of bullets in the air, and collared the suspect a few hundred meters from the scene of the stabbing.

04-Mar-19: Pre-dawn vehicle ramming attack on Israelis north of Ramallah

There has been yet another vehicle-ramming attack on Israelis this morning (Monday). According to a breaking Times of Israel report [here], a vehicle in which three persons were traveling was the weapon by which an attack was launched on Israeli security personnel before dawn today near an Arab village it names as N'ima.

Two injured Israelis were evacuated from the scene by helicopter and ambulance for emergency medical care at, we believe, Tel Hashomer Medical Center. One is said to be an IDF soldier whom it describes as being seriously inured. A member of the Border Guard (Mishmar Hagvul in Hebrew) is said to be lightly hurt.

Two of the attack-vehicle's three occupants are said to have been killing and a third wounded. The report quotes an IDF statement “from an initial investigation it appears to be a (terror) attack.”

A Hebrew-language social media report says the overnight attack at about 3:30 this morning in the Binyamin region was at Talmon/Dolev Junction which is about half way between the Israeli community of Dolev and an Arab village (of some 3,500 people) called Kafr Ni'ma (ניעמה) located about 13 km north-west of Ramallah. The less-injured service member is reported by first responders to be about 19. The more seriously-injured soldier is said, in an IDF statement [here], to be an officer. Haaretz says he's in his early twenties and in critical condition after being run-over. No names yet.

A Ynet report adds:

"The troops had stopped their vehicle at the roadside at night—Israeli media reported it had broken down—and were deliberately struck, the military said."

From the Palestinian Arab side, an Arabic language tweet at about 9:00 am Monday from the SAFA Palestinian Press Agency [here] quotes the PA's Ministry of Health about what it calls

"the martyrdom of two citizens and the wounding of a third after the occupation shot them near the village of Kafr Nehmeh west of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, and no information until the moment about the identity of the martyrs and the injured."

("Occupied" Ramallah is where the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority has its capital. Fatah and Hamas are deadly rivals. SAFA, based in the Gaza Strip, used to operate a Facebook page but this was shut down by Facebook about a year ago.)

03-Jan-16: Another day in an ongoing war

Hussein Dawabshe interviewed this week [Image Source]

A cold, rainy and somewhat gloomy January day, and terrorism has insinuated its way into the lives of Israelis in almost every part of the country. In no particular order:

• After Friday's murderous point-blank shooting attack on patrons (and staff) at a busy, central Tel Aviv drinking place on Friday afternoon [see our posts of Friday afternoon and Saturday night], the manhunt for Nashat Melhem continued all day today (Sunday). We happened to visit north Tel Aviv's Ibn Gabirol precinct this afternoon, and saw something we are accustomed to seeing regularly in Jerusalem, but rarely outside it: heavily armed rapid-response police riding in pairs on fast motor bikes. Ynet says security forces are patrolling the city in large numbers, "focusing on north Tel Aviv, where Melhem was last seen and where he is believed to still be hiding since the attack on Friday. They are still waiting for the terrorist to make a mistake, or for a "golden tip" that would lead them to him." There's concern the fugitive gunman will launch another attack: "Because of that, the Tel Aviv municipality decided to increase security across the city, particularly around education institutions, including Tel Aviv University. Despite that, many parents chose not to send their children to school. According to the municipality, in the north of the city only about 50 percent of the students came to school..." 
• Two men murdered in Friday's attack, Alon Bakal and Shimon Ruimi, were buried today. Thousands attended the two funerals in Carmiel and Ofakim. There remain about ten individuals who are still being treated for their injuries. A third victim has still not yet been definitively connected to the Friday terror attack, but tragically is as dead as the other two. He is Amin Shaban, a taxi driver and an Israeli Muslim Arab murdered in north Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon about an hour after the Dizengoff shootings. Two hundred of his family and friends, including his three widows and 11 children, gathered in Lod this afternoon to lay him to rest. Ynet quotes family members saying they still do not know whether his murder is connected to the Dizengoff attack. "There are a lot of rumors and the family is not being updated. There is still an attempt to see if the background is criminal, and that's bizarre because there's no chance".
• Around 4 this afternoon (Sunday) in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv ("Government House") precinct, a Palestinian Arab knife man launched a stabbing attack on a civilian waiting at a bus stop on Barazani Street. He pulled out his knife and managed to stab but failed (because the weapon became bent out of shape) to penetrate the skin of his intended victim, a person he, of course, did not know. He then fled in the direction of nearby Sur Baher, an Arab community. A Jerusalem Post report says security forces "launched a manhunt shortly after initial distress calls and apprehended a suspect who fits the description given by eyewitnesses". He was arrested.
• At about 2:00 this afternoon, a female soldier was struck and wounded in a sniper-fire shooting attack at a security checkpoint close to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. A search was conducted by Israeli security forces of the area. Haaretz says the shooter is believed to have fired from one of the adjoining Palestinian Arab residences: "A 20-year-old female Israeli soldier was moderately wounded... She was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem. Security forces are combing the area... Magen David Adom paramedic Hanoch Zalinger Siffer said... "She was shot in the lower body, and we provided medical treatment while evacuating her to the hospital", which we understand was Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.
• Indictments were announced this morning for several Jewish males - some of them minors - accused of involvement in the firebombing of a residence in the Arab village of Duma ["31-Jul-15: In the wake of a lethal arson attack"]. This disturbing story is going to be with us for some time to come. For now, here is what Hussein Dawabsha, an elderly member of the clan whose daughter, son-in-law and grandson died in the fire on July 31, 2015, reportedly said in an interview today: "There is no law nor justice in Israel. It’s one big show... The Israeli court system, the State of Israel is a dark country. They will probably decide to put them in prison for several years and then release them. Instead of killing them like they killed my boy and my grandson... Those who burned my family should themselves be burned... Only an intifada will avenge the death of the Dawabsha family. They should continue with more attacks, having faith in Allah. Only in this way we will achieve our rights." We say that putting terrorists into prison and then releasing them a short time later is indeed a serious issue and a heavy, almost insurmountable, challenge to justice in this country. We suspect Grandfather Dawabsha is unaware that by far the majority of those walking free - like the more-than-a-thousand convicted terrorists, many of them murderers of Jewish Israelis, who were set loose in the Shalit Deal in 2011 - were, of course, Palestinian Arabs. And most of them have sickeningly murderous views similar to his.
• Grandfather Dawabsha's ugly threats contrast greatly with the messages issued in his name half a year ago in the immediate aftermath of the Duma village deaths. Here's what he is reported to have said in a Times of Israel interview published August 2, 2015 [here]: He had been a construction worker who helped build Chaim Sheba Medical Center, the vast Tel Aviv hospital where doctors are today working to save the life of his four-year-old grandson Ahmad. "My friends are Jews. I worked here, and helped build the buildings at the Sheba Medical Center where my relatives are now hospitalized... We want to live. Please join our prayer for their recovery — Jews and Arabs — so that my grandson will be the last victim of the terror war... We are simple people, who pursue and seek peace,.. We don’t want terror on either side, and we condemn it." For reasons which ought to be obvious, there's no reason to be surprised.
• A shooting attack in the Har Hevron area around 6 this evening has resulted in injuries to an Israeli male. Times of Israel says he is an IDF soldier; his injuries are believed to be non-life-threatening. No word on the shooter. Further details to come.
• Saturday night, shots were fired at vehicles traveling the Tunnel Road that connects Jerusalem with the Gush Etzion communities to its south, passing through and underneath hills on the south and east of Bethlehem. The section of Route 60 running to, through and from the tunnel was closed to traffic for some hours while security personnel sought the shooter, effectively isolating thousdands of households in Efrat, Alon Shvut and other sizable communities in the Gush Etzion area. Ynet says the sole victim of the shooting is a Palestinian Arab driver, whose injuries are not life-threatening. The shooter has not yet been apprehended.

Another day.

09-Aug-15: Who's actually disabled in this affair?

The child with a hospital clown at

Tel Hashomer [Image Source]

Winston Churchill once famously said

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Since his long life ended before the emergence of today's social media, Churchill might have expressed it differently if he had seen how distortions and outright falsehoods have the ability to go to sleep for a while after being exposed, and then emerge via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and the others to get recycled, reinvigorated and relaunched. They can then do a great deal more damage while those of us concerned with old fashioned notions - like truth - are still struggling with our closets.

This morning, looking for a specific article that throws light on the terrorist attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem carried out by Hamas exactly 14 years ago, we stumbled across this:

#DemandJustice for Pal children left disabled by Israel's bombs in #Gaza #NoMoreImpunity #ForTheChildrenOfPalestine pic.twitter.com/OvKGPNhwyG

— Mirna Miranda (@MirandaMirna) August 8, 2015

It's a Tweet that went live just yesterday. And it exemplifies the point made by Churchill, updated to the age of the Tweetstream.

There's no doubt that vast numbers of Palestinian Arab children living under the ghastly Hamas regime suffer terribly. Sometimes, that suffering gets much worse when open warfare breaks out, which happens more or less as often as Gaza's Islamist overlords want it to happen. Last summer, for instance, when the constant fire of hundreds of Gazan rockets into Israel and at anything Israeli finally got too much for the Israeli side, there was a great deal of suffering. We understand perhaps better than many where to lay the blame for the suffering and how truly barbaric are the people who hold the destinies of Gazans in their corrupt and violent hands.

But war has additional dimensions. And whoever is the person behind the Twitter account above (sometimes there's no actual person) is also at war.

The image, tearing at the heart of most people, stops you in your tracks. The message it conveys doesn't really need to be articulated: if you can do this to a defenseless child, you're a savage. It's the kind of message we hear a great deal from Gaza and from the apologists who defend its institutionalized, imposed-by-relentless-force barbarism. It's hypocrisy incarnate.

But far more than the effect it has on people like us - and we know how to look behind the scenes, get to the facts, scrape away the exaggerations and the lies - a Tweet like this and the photo it drags along with it fills the heads of many, many, many people living far from the scene, people who know relatively little beyond what is beamed at them by people with messages to market. And for soldiers like the Twitterer we just mentioned, the picture is the whole narrative.

As for the facts, who cares?

So here are the facts behind the image above, despatched from a Twitter account yesterday, and circulating the globe at this very moment, drilling into people's opinions, minds and prejudices.

First, it's not new. Here is how it was exploited last year:

Source: Falastin News, September 23, 2014

The real source is an Associated Press syndicated report by Diaa Hadid, datelined May 3, 2013. You can see both the text and the accompanying photo online even now via Huffington Post. It's a story that got wide circulation via many AP licensees including Times of Israel ["Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital", May 3, 2013],

The image that went out with it has this unmistakable caption:

In this Monday, April 29, 2013 photo, Palestinian child Mohammed Al-Farra is seen in the Tel Hashomer Hospital near Ramat Gan, central Israel. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

Then the dramatic photo, but not the Diaa Hadid article, got a flurry of attention two years after that when a different propagandist for the Palestinian Arab cause, a journalist, brazenly recycled it as depicting a child victim of the fighting in and around Gaza the previous summer. Here's his Twitter post, since removed:

The owner of the Twitter account in question (@mogaza) has an interesting bio. He's Mohammed Omer and he calls himself "Award winning journalist... Gaza-New York-Amsterdam". 

Over at an alert Israeli news site, they expanded on this in a May 10, 2015 article, revealing that Omer

started the Rafah Today blog and has written for numerous major news outlets including Al Jazeera, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the New Statesman, Aftonbladet and others [and] received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2008. The Prize is granted to journalists who "tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts." [Israel National News]

Prize-winning Mohammad Omer 

in hisTwitter portrait

The good people at Honest Reporting added some wording from the Gellhorn Prize

We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda.

In announcing the Gellhorn Prize, the judges said of Omer that he

was honoured as "literally the voice of the voiceless" and his dispatches were described as a "humane record of the injustice imposed on a community forgotten by much of the world".

We have gotten fairly used to hearing about voiceless and humane and justice from people who lack basic integrity, Let's say that, in this particular case, we're not convinced. Anyone with Google can search to see the provenance of almost any published image. It's fairly plain that Mr Omer didn't care to know. Or knew and didn't care to be honest. And there's this additional detail that we have not seen reported elsewhere: his Twitter account shows that he follows Diaa Hadid, the New York Times reporter who wrote the article about the little Gazan boy.

(If we're wrong about any of this, Mr Omer, we would be glad to hear from you: email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com)

If the little boy in the photos has any sort of future, it will be despite - and certainly not because of - his Gazan, Palestinian, Arab peoplehood and heritage. To be more blunt about it, it will be because here in Israel, a child's life is a precious thing, and not a chip to be coldly bargained with or tossed away.

Are we sounding offensive? That's not our intention but this is a searing tale. In our words, summarizing the AP report, which is our only source for the facts, here's the story behind the photo:

Mohammed al-Farra was born in Gaza with a rare genetic disease and has spent most of his life living in the children’s ward of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, part of the Tel Hashomer hospital complex, Ramat Gan, Israel. It's one of the finest pediatric centers anywhere, and certainly in the Middle East (here's an impressive CNN video from 2012 that highlights their work among Arabs and Israelis in medical need). "Complications" set in and his limbs "had to be" amputated and were. The article implies the parents are cousins, a major factor in birth defects that come with the Arab world's devotion to consanguinity. They abandoned him - the father threatened to take a second wife if the mother didn’t leave him in hospital and come back home to Khan Yunis. She complied. Somehow (not so clear exactly how from the article, but we are personally familiar with such rescue operations), the afflicted little newborn was rushed to Israel for emergency treatment. His grandfather is with him in Tel Aviv, and cares for him in the hospital. The child's Israeli doctors are attached to him, and fund-raise to cover his bills. The child and his grandfather live in the sunny pediatric ward. He has been fitted with prosthetic limbs, funded by donors, but his future is unknown. And now a direct quote: "Dr. Raz Somech, the senior physician in the Tel Hashomer pediatric immunology department, attributes Mohammed’s genetic disorder to the several generations of cousin marriages in his family... a third of patients in his department are Palestinians and most have genetic diseases that were the result of close-relation marriages... 10.8 percent of {Gazan Arabs] suffer some kind of disability that affects their mental health, eyesight, hearing or mobility..." The article ends with the Gazan grandfather saying of Mohammed: "He needs a home."

The reporter could have added, but did not, that he might find it among the Jews. As for his own people, the Gazans, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Very little in life is black and white. There are good people on their side. There are bad people on ours. But the value systems that lie at the heart of the lives we live over here are world's apart - for whatever reason - from theirs. 

Glossing over this serves no one.